Access State Digital Resources from the Library of Congress (Link Included)

One of our librarians made me aware of a very nice web site from the Library of Congress. At this site, you can get access to the Digital Archives that have been created by the various state libraries or archives.

What makes this very nice is that through this one site you can get access to the links that will take you to the digital resources that have been created by each state.

Our genealogical research may start out with research that keeps us searching in the state of origin of our ancestors. But it does not take too long before our research expands as we discover information about our ancestors. Soon, we are interested in a few more states and by the time you research has advanced, you may be interested in knowing a great deal about many states.

I would encourage my readers to really take advantage of the digital resources being made available by the states. In this compiled list of resources from the Library of Congress, you may find such resources as:

Digital Resources from the State Library

Digital Resources from the State Archive

An Encyclopedia of a state e.g. Encyclopedia of Alabama

Interfaces That Gets You Access to Digital Resources for an Entire State

Memory Projects At A State Level

I personally have researched what is available from the Illinois Digital Archives. I was amazed at the discoveries that I made. Much of what was found was material that was in a local library that provided digital data of what it had through one collecting point that all libraries funneled their material to.

I was able to discover uploaded pictures of cousins that served in World War II, pictures of cousins when they were in grammar school in the 1930s and images of gravestones of some of these people and the cemetery location where they were. I was lucky to actually be able to see these images that were properly identified as to who was in the picture. The names of these people were on the pictures and each name was entered into the database as a search term under the surnames category.

How lucky is that!!

Surely, you have felt the same giddiness when you try searching a database expecting to find nothing and then discover “golden nuggets” of information that just mesmerized you. This is how I felt after accessing the Illinois Digital Archives and discovering photos that contained my cousins.

Through this nice portal from the Library of Congress, you can now quickly find the links to any state that is of interest to you in your research and search to your heart’s content, making discoveries you never would have anticipated.

You can reach this very nice and handy portal at the Library of Congress at: